Robin Turner

Did Einstein Really Say Anything?

Here is a sobering exercise that any web writer should perform at least once. Next time you see an uplifting quotation by Albert Einstein on a website or forwarded e-mail, Google it. You will doubtless find hundreds of sites confirming the quotation. However, chances are that they will be quotation sites or sites abut pop psychology, spirituality, philosophy etc. Now paste the quotation into Google Scholar and see if you can find a proper citation for it. You might get lucky, but there's a good chance you will go through pages of results and the best you will find is a "quoted in" citation.

Some time spent trawling Google Scholar for the source of a rather nice quotation was leading me to the conclusion that Albert Einstein never said anything of note on any subject other than physics. The quotation, which I first found in Elephant Journal, is:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nice, huh? Just the thing I would like to quote, just like hundreds of other people have done. But the nearest I could find was a letter from Einstein that went like this:

A human being is a part of the whole world called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind (Calaprice, Dear Professor Einstein, 184).

Close but no cigar. Of course he could have written both paragraphs in different places, but the first one looks suspiciously like a mutation of the second. I'd take a guess and say that someone, probably in a book about Buddhism, quoted the first sentence and added a few sentences of their own, then someone quoted that, munging it all together and attributing the whole thing to Einstein.

To conclude with a currently popular quotation:

The problem with Internet quotes is that you can't always depend on their accuracy - Abraham Lincoln, 1864.

Update: Wikiquotes traces the quotation I was searching for to as far back as The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972) while regarding the one cited in Calaprice as more likely to be the original. Wikiquotes is also a much easier, though naturally less reliable, way to check the authenticity of quotations. What is really amusing is the respectability of the publications in which spurious quotations appear; for example, The British Medical Journal attributes the folowing quotation to Einstein: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction." Apparently it was actually by E.F. Schumacher. Oops.

A human being is a part of the whole world called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness

That's a very Kantian sort of statement. Which is plausible, because Einstein read the Critique of Pure Reason.